Tuesday November 8, 2022 is Election Day in the United States of America. In addition to Congressional "midterms" at the federal level, many state governors and other more local offices are up for grabs. Given how things shook out over Election Day 2020, things could get a little crazy.
...or, perhaps, not! But here's the Megathread for if they do. Talk about your local concerns, your national predictions, your suspicions re: election fraud and interference, how you plan to vote, anything election related is welcome here. Culture War thread rules apply, with the addition of Small-Scale Questions and election-related "Bare Links" allowed in this thread only (unfortunately, there will not be a subthread repository due to current technical limitations).
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Notes -
In a comment below @DradisPing made the confident assertion that "Sharpiegate was ultimately confirmed" but when I asked for evidence they couldn't provide anything except their "recollection". This is quite a curious phenomenon for many reasons.
For those not in the know, Sharpiegate was one of the very first entries in the very long list of 2020 election fraud claims. This theory appears to have originated with an unnamed woman outside an AZ polling place claiming to have seen tabulation machines reject ballots where sharpie markers were used. She hypothesized that poll workers were handing out sharpies to voters with the express purpose of invalidating ballots. This claim was quickly repeated by others and went viral, with some additional details glommed on (e.g. ink bleeding through paper, voters finding their ballots were 'canceled', etc.). The Maricopa board of supervisors quickly issued a statement the next day on Nov 4 2020:
As far as I can tell, Maricopa's statement was the last word on this topic, despite the amount of election integrity scrutiny that was subsequently focused on Arizona. Sharpiegate was an election fraud theory with an unusually short lifespan.
So back to @DradisPing, their confident assertion had more than just one piece:
Sharpiegate was ultimately confirmed
Some votes were lost because of Sharpiegate
The votes that were lost were primarily/entirely Trump votes
All three parts appear to be false. DradisPing was aware enough of Sharpiegate's history to know that it was putatively debunked (hence "ultimately confirmed"), so where did the other parts come from? DradisPing's claim was up for at least 5 hours and generated multiple comments before I took the unusual step of using Google (or Bing for the freaks out there, you know who you are) to see the assertions had any merit. If the only evidence they can muster is their "recollection", and if nothing on the internet corroborates this recollection, it's fair to conclude DradisPing was mistaken. If so, I will preemptively praise them for editing their post and admitting their error.
While it's not unusual for humans to err, it is unusual for errors to fall in the same direction as this one did. Assuming that DradisPing was earnestly mistaken, I would be very curious to know exactly how they came to believe multiple fictitious claims. We're all just fish doing our best to swim in this ether, and sometimes we inadvertently absorb false information just through osmosis. For example recently I was out drinking with a friend and we ended up talking about the nutritional value of organ meats and I made the confident assertion that "beef heart has a ton of creatine" but my friend gave me a skeptical "you sure about that?" look. Sure enough, a quick google search (or Ask Jeeves for all you good girls out there) made me realize I was talking out of my ass. My best guess is that I read a random bodybuilding forum post years ago, uncritically accepted it as true for whatever reason, and then carried it undisturbed since then.
[Edit1: a few people reasonably interpreted my story as me trying to downplay my errors by offering up something banal. That was not the intent. I've made other mistakes bigger than the example I used, but that was meant to be an illustration. Working backwards in time, one mistake I made was how I had previously heavily insinuated that Colin Wright was intentionally refusing to have his PayPal account restored as a way to grift more donations. I reached this belief based on how often he was shilling for donations and how he ignored my emails. After speaking to him further, I realized he had perfectly innocent reasons for having ignored me. I publicly stated that my suspicion was off-base.
Prior to that, I admitted error here: "I was wrong when I said @anti_dan 's claim about J6 defendants "held without bail for wandering in" was fictitious. At least three different people reasonably fit this qualification: Timothy Louis Hale-Cusanelli, Karl Dresch, Michael Curzio, and possibly others."]
Hopefully DradisPing will do the right thing here, but perhaps it's again worth revisiting why some people are apparently so reluctant to admit error? Question for everyone: Have you ever found yourself making errors in a uniform direction? If so, what steps did you take to prevent that from happening again? To the extent that your media diet, social bubble, whatever are the source of your errors, what heuristics do you follow to avoid falling into motivated reasoning and confirmation bias? And lastly, how can we make people less terrified of using search engines?
[Edit2: DradisPing now claims their source for this claim is remembering someone prominent on Twitter saying it. No other evidence has been presented besides that]
I am not entirely convinced about the reliability of the Maricopa County election people, given the recent problems there once again. I have no opinion on this issue one way or the other (though I am a little surprised they recommended using markers, since I think everybody is familiar with how they bleed through paper, but maybe the election ballots paper was a different kind).
Your position is reasonable. When I said Maricopa's had the "last word" I meant that chronologically, not that it's unimpeachable.
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... or DuckDuckGo, for us nerds!
I appreciate that you are taking the time to fact-check both yours and others' assertions. I recommend not using time between responses as an indication of indecision; some of us deliberately restrict our internet usage.
I can't speak to SharpieGate, but I can recall when I was relatively certain (say, 95%) that there were people in US government / political elite who knew that 9/11 would likely happen and benefited from it. I wouldn't say that I was deeply into 9/11-Truth conspiracies (though I did come across them, and I do own a copy of the 9/11 Commission Report, so maybe I need to re-evaluate that).
My certainty was based not on corroborated facts, but rather on my mental model for how elite social world works. If I were to try to summarize:
Politically involved elites tend to be interconnected (politically involved elite people know lots of other elite people).
These interconnections cross international boundaries (e.g., they or their kids go to the same prestigious colleges).
People pass information (or at least tips) along their network of friends / acquaintances.
Large well-funded conspiracies leak, and 9/11 was a large well-funded conspiracy.
It's been two decades. I am far less certain now (more like 20%) about my original assertion, because I haven't come across any well-publicized scandal that so-and-so did some insider trading based on their advanced knowledge on the matter. My suspicion did not disappear entirely though, because my mental model for how elite social world works hasn't changed.
Us true nerds have moved on to Kagi.
I've been playing with https://search.marginalia.nu/ but it's not something I'd use as a primary because of scaling issues. Still refreshing to use an engine that acts like the old days and actually finds niche pages based on text and content instead of one that wants me to talk to it in sentences like a three year old and still not show me things I know exist on the lesser trafficked parts of the web.
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I agree with this and did not intend to imply otherwise. When I mentioned the 5 hour response gap, it was in reference to how no one else who responded bothered to do something as perfunctory as using a search engine.
How you broke down your belief system is an interesting exercise and I wish I saw that more often, so thank you for sharing it.
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I think it is poor etiquette to start a top-level post about this instead of just replying, especially given how extremely recent the original post was.
Anyway, I haven't followed the issue very closely but I have seen claims relating to an internal email that appears to show that the people running the election were aware of "issues and concerns" related to the use of Sharpies and instructed that ballpoint pens be used for early voting but sharpies on election day. The article I cited refers to this as a Conspiracy Theory but despite that seems to accept the email as real.
I strongly disagree. resetting conversations to the top layer for a point you consider both particularly important and relevant to a general audience is a reasonable practice.
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You describing this as poor etiquette potentially has some merit and I would be curious to hear more. From my perspective, I would not consider it poor etiquette if I was on the receiving end of the above post, as the scenario seems trivially easy to clear up (e.g. "Yep, looks like I was wrong on that point. My bad!"). I don't see making a mistake as indication of a personal failing so it shouldn't be something to be embarrassed by. To the extent that anyone who makes a mistake refuses to admit error, or to the extent a topic generates a pattern of errors skewing in the same direction, I think there is utility to shining a spotlight on it.
Regarding your substantive link, I see no issue with asserting something along the lines of "election officials had issues and concerns about using sharpies on ballots". That's fine, and defensible. Similarly, jfk posted a link to the Cyberninja report which appears to substantiate some claims about sharpies potentially bleeding through ballots (though Cyberninjas couldn't find a single ballot that was invalidated because of that). That's also fine, and defensible. But neither link can be used to support the trio of assertions (sharpiegate was real, votes were lost, the lost votes were trump votes) that DradisPing made, so it just strikes me as collateral to the issue. If assertions cannot be defended on their own, what's the relevance of bringing up evidence to support weaker tangentially-related assertions? The latter does not excuse the former, and the effort strikes me as an attempt to be "directionally correct".
It hasn't even been 24 hours. It's Wednesday in a weekly thread that starts on Monday. You say there's no embarrassment in making a mistake and I would like to believe you think that, but you not only posted a top level response to ensure everyone knows how wrong he is, you want to hold a flipping symposium on how he could be so wrong. And then instead of proving it by embarrassing yourself with an example of when you made a similar mistake in front of peers, you gave an example of a time you made a mistake about a bit of esoterica, of the biochemistry of a cow, affecting nothing and no one, as a result of reading too much about lifting.
But what really upsets me is that you didn't wait at all. I think people deserve 48 hours at least, this is a forum not instant messaging. Sometimes people don't have time to write a thousand words about the election or apologising and addressing how they could be so wrong. Sometimes it takes a while before you find the right words - I can't count the number of times I have regretted posting something a day later when I think of a better way to put it. (I am guaranteed to do so with this post I think.) Sometimes they're just not in the god damned mood. You don't get to decide they're refusing to admit they're wrong before a day has passed. If it's a pattern that's one thing, but even still you should wait a few days, get some more examples or just reply like normal.
Edit: lol it's Wednesday not Tuesday
This was the unintended take-away from my tiny story but I acknowledge your reading of it was reasonable. I've made other mistakes bigger than the example I used, but that was meant to be an illustration. Working backwards in time, one mistake I made was how I had previously heavily insinuated that Colin Wright was intentionally refusing to have his PayPal account restored as a way to grift more donations. I reached this belief based on how often he was shilling for donations and how he ignored my emails. After speaking to him further, I realized he had perfectly innocent reasons for having ignored me. I publicly stated that my suspicion was off-base.
Prior to that, I admitted error here: "I was wrong when I said @anti_dan 's claim about J6 defendants "held without bail for wandering in" was fictitious. At least three different people reasonably fit this qualification: Timothy Louis Hale-Cusanelli, Karl Dresch, Michael Curzio, and possibly others."
Both examples are from the last couple of weeks, so I'm sure there are others if you keep going back.
I'm open to arguments that this was bad etiquette but I have not been swayed. For one, DradisPing's assertion was one made confidently, as a top-level post, and was central to their overall point about Maricopa County. Yet the only evidence they could cite was their "recollection". I think they had enough of an opportunity to correct the record, and in my post above I did not accuse them of refusing to admit wrong. Secondly, this is a very common pattern with election fraud claims, where they're uncritically presented and left unchallenged. I would want to see more hesitation from people before posting something that would take seconds to double check on a search engine.
This sentence doesn't make sense to me. Surely it's one or the other? If they aren't refusing to admit wrong why don't they get more of an opportunity to correct the record?
That's cool of you to list some of your own mistakes - very cool, and on a regular board I would consider the matter closed. But you are quite smart, so it would be a lot more impressive if you could please edit them into your op?
Because I thought more abstractly about it, and if I was trolling and I wanted to rub my superiority into someone's face - and I thought I had been caught in the act, I would have to dismantle part of my post to defuse the accusation of trolling. And I thought about what I would be willing to do, and I'd be happy to list personal flaws after the fact - as long as my op remained a shining monument to my superiority. I know this is how smart people think because the mods used to accuse me of doing it all the time before they realised I wasn't that smart.
Sorry, that was confusing verbiage from me. I started by asking them to list their evidence. After they cited their recollection as the evidence, I concluded they were wrong. Only at that point would they need to go back and "correct the record" regarding their initial assertion. So far that hasn't happened yet so now I think I can finally say they're refusing to admit wrong.
I already did! 6 hours before you asked :)
That is outrageously awesome man, cheers. I knew there was a reason I always felt comfortable talking to you and I am glad I wasn't mistaken. I still disagree about your timing but since I don't think you are being malicious I can agree to disagree :)
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I agree with BadCivilization - it feels like bad etiquette to make a top post calling someone out this fast. I agree that people who make big claims as top level posts should respond to criticism. And I'm in favor of shining on light on people when they fail to respond. But this is too fast to accuse someone of intentionally ignoring your post. Give the person 24 hours, no?
I like arguing on the motte but I don't have notifications set up or anything. I don't think going dark during an argument always means I'm avoiding a strong point. I see this as a nonsynchronous medium. I would like to have a grace period.
I think your points about grace periods are fair. Does it change your mind that DradisPing already said the source of their claim was their recollection? To me that strikes me as enough of a final answer. The other relevant factor for me is that this fell under the election fraud penumbra which in my mind tends to have too many of these types of claims uncritically presented.
No. I recollect all kinds of shit vaguely, then search through and find a source. Sometimes I'm right after that, sometimes I'm wrong. But not sourcing it in one comment certainly doesn't mean there is no source.
I, also, find this kind of "tagging someone below to talk shit on them" top level post to be rude. If it happens occasionally, fine, but don't do it all the time.
That said, I have to laugh at the replies you get that are like "Fine @ymeshkout, do your evil lawyer things [like research and rhetoric], just because you have the better argument doesn't mean you're right!"
I agree with this. The reason I chose to highlight DradisPing's claim is that it was central to their thesis about Maricopa County up to some bullshit again. Maybe the thesis remains true, but it's still fair game to point out that someone's core premise appears faulty. I don't think I'm asking too much of people here: if you want to post an argument, it's not unreasonable to expect people to do some very basic homework first.
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Those are both good points. I think you're right that you have justification for posting a top level post about DradisPing's response and are not breaking etiquette.
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Disagreed. When someone makes a effortpost reply, with enough meat to be a toplevel post, I'd prefer it to not get buried downthread.
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So topic closed? You wrote all of this on an election thread to say someone else is wrong?
In my opinion, you're being very biased with your analysis.
What is your goal here?
This is a discussion forum. Writing something large and detailed to disagree with someone else is our bread and butter.
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I made an effort to check DradisPing's claims on my own and only then did I ask multiple clarifying questions:
what is your source that Sharpiegate v2.0 was confirmed?
What is your evidence that bleed through caused votes to be lost? How many votes exactly?
Do you have a source besides your recollection?
what is the evidence that ballots were invalidated?
Has anything come up since to contradict [Maricopa's] claims?
Except for DradisPing citing their "recollection" as the source, none of the questions were answered. So on what basis do you claim that my analysis is "very biased"? What would you suggest I do differently? I'm listening.
As for my goal, it mirrors the site's banner text:
So when I see people make mistakes, and those mistakes fall along a predictable line, I'm curious to know why that happens. I would assume others would share my curiosity, isn't that why we're all here? I aim to please, and hopefully I can help someone discover why they keep falling into the same trap. If you disagree with my efforts, what would you suggest I do differently? Still listening.
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